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Microsoft's online product director May 11 dispelled the notion that Google Docs improves the experience of using Microsoft Office, and demonstrated how moving files created with Office results in the loss of data fidelity.

Google has been pitching migration from Office, which has more than 500 million seats worldwide, to Google Docs, the company's Web-based document, presentation and spreadsheet centerpiece of the Google Apps collaboration software suite.

Matthew Glotzbach, Google enterprise product management director, said May 11 Docs makes Office 2003 and 2007 better because users can store Office documents in Google's cloud and share them in their original format.

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Alex Payne, director of Microsoft's online product management team, argued that this was not the case in a blog post and demo video May 11, one day before Microsoft's ballyhooed launch of Office 2010 in New York. "They are claiming that an organization can use both seamlessly," Payne wrote. "This just isn't the case."

Payne explained that converting Office files to be read and edited in Docs results in the loss of such data components as charts, styles, watermarks, fonts, tracked changes and SmartArt.

To prove his point, a Microsoft product manager demonstrated in this video how uploading and converting Office files for the Google Docs cloud results in several lost data components of the document originally created in Office. The file's original watermark, page breaks, SmartArt, chart and columns were missing in action or wrongly rendered in Google Docs.

The official then showed how users can cleanly move Office documents to Office Word Web Apps in Office 2010, a move that left the document's formatting and content nearly identical to its original state.